Sinister: A Paranormal Fantasy (Sinisters Book 1) (8 page)

Oliver burst into laughter. “I don’t think ten-pin kits are what your website meant, mate.”

Matt flushed. Anna tilted her head in consideration, then pronounced, "You know, from a few feet away, it does look like a plumbing uniform.”

His chest felt warm as Anna stood up for him, but Oliver's laughter had made Matt realize just how silly his idea was. "Yeah, but who sends sixteen-year-old plumbers to fix a leak at 11 PM on a Friday night?"

Anna just shrugged. Now thoroughly embarrassed, he ripped the shirt off and shoved all three in his backpack. If he had to do this again—Matt pushed that thought away. He wasn’t going to prepare for the next time he committed a crime when he shouldn’t be doing this at all.

“We’re gonna head straight up to Caracalla’s office," he said, his face still burning. Despite his embarrassment, he could feel himself warming to his new role as director of this mission. “I looked up his address and VoTech’s got the entire top floor, just like Luke said, so it’ll just be a matter of finding which office is his.”

Matt saw Oliver give Anna a sharp look at his words, and belatedly he realized that Oliver still had no idea what they were doing. Matt did a mental shrug. He was bound to find out sometime.

“So we’re gonna just head to the top. If it’s locked, Oliver can work his magic—” Matt wiggled his fingers to emphasize the words—“and we’ll just go door by door through the offices until we find the biggest one. Then we search for—anything you wouldn’t normally see in an office.” He changed his wording halfway through, realizing that Oliver still didn’t know what they were looking for. For that matter, neither did he. Doubt crept into his mind as he realized how crazy their plan was. People broke into offices to search for clues in mystery novels, not in real life.

Luke sent us here
, he reminded himself.
He wouldn’t have done that if he didn’t think we’d find something important.
At least, he hoped that were true. It was all that was getting him through this insane night.

“Got it,” Anna said. “I’ll explain later, I promise,” she added to Oliver’s exasperated expression.

Oliver rolled his eyes but followed the pair as they started for the stairs. Pride swelled in Matt as he watched them both accept his instructions without question, but he quickly remembered that they still needed to do everything he’d outlined. It was a sobering realization.

When they reached the top floor, Matt’s heart was beating from more than just exertion. The metal door in the stairwell stood closed, standing guard to the floor beyond. Oliver whipped out his toolkit and set to work on the lock.

A loud pop sounded from above, and Matt jumped. He twisted around, frantically trying to find the source of the noise before it found them. The stairwell was empty, and he frowned in puzzlement. If someone was coming, they needed to hide. Or not, he reminded himself; they were trying to pretend they belonged there.

A light touch on his arm interrupted his racing thoughts. He looked down to see Anna’s fingertips resting just above his elbow. He felt a brief frisson of excitement at the touch, but he pushed it aside for a time when they weren’t becoming felons and looked up at her. She was smiling ruefully. Her hand lifted off of his arm and pointed up at the ceiling. Matt followed the line her finger created and saw the light overhead. It was a socket light that had two bulbs, one of which was burnt out. It took him a minute to process what this meant. Once he did, he smiled too. The popping noise had come from the light bulb when it burnt out. He belatedly realized the landing had gotten darker.

The sound of Oliver clearing his throat returned Matt’s attention to the door. Oliver stood with his hand on the doorknob, toolkit tucked away.

“That was fast,” Matt said.

Oliver’s expression turned sheepish. “Turns out it wasn’t locked.”

Matt burst into laughter. “We’re the worst burglars ever.”

Laughing helped release some of the tension that had built up in him on the climb, and Matt entered the ninth floor feeling more relaxed than he had since Anna had come up with this scheme. The majority of the floor was open space filled with cubicles, which were divided into groups of four to create aisles. Each cubicle was a different color, ranging from pale yellow to midnight blue, lending a festive air to the place. Silence sat heavily over the room, but Matt could easily imagine it filled with the bustle and noise of workers during the weekdays.

Along the perimeter of the space, offices stood with their doors half open, presumably left open by the workers on their way out a few hours earlier. Darkness stood as a barrier in the triangular opening created by the door frame.

Matt’s eye was caught by one office in the far corner of the room. Unlike all of the other offices, the door to this one was shut—actually, it was a double door, which usually meant a big office. Matt checked the mental map he had of the city and confirmed that that particular office was on the capitol square and would have a spectacular view of the capitol building.

“I think that’s Caracalla’s office,” Matt whispered. Despite his own instructions to act normal, it was hard to pretend they weren’t doing something wrong. Because we are, the ever-present nag in his head reminded him. Matt frowned. He wished his brain didn’t have so many opinions.

After a quick glance where he was pointing, Anna nodded. “I bet you’re right.”

The three padded across the fibrous carpet covering the floor, their feet making soft noises. At the door, their suspicions were confirmed by a gold plaque hammered to the door proclaiming “Peter Caracalla.” He and Anna exchanged excited glances.

Oliver jiggled the door handle, checking to see if it was actually locked before getting out his picks. Matt stifled a laugh. A minute later, Oliver twisted the handle and the door swung inward.

Matt shivered as he stepped over the threshold into the office. It felt as though an ice cube had slid down his back the second he walked in. While the rest of the floor had felt friendly, Caracalla’s office reeked of hostility. Matt felt the wall for the light switch and flipped it on, hoping to dispel some of the unpleasant atmosphere. As the lights flickered to life, he caught a glimpse of a snake-like tail slithering out of sight under a filing cabinet. So the creatures were here too. He wondered if they were drawn to this office in particular, or were just everywhere. He tucked the thought away to ask Luke next time he saw him.

A large mahogany desk stood directly in front of him, facing toward the door. The surface was clear except for a computer monitor, a desk mat, a pen holder, and what looked like a bowl of pistachios. On the left wall, the two filing cabinets he’d noted squatted with their drawers shut tight. The right wall, as well as the wall straight ahead, were sheets of glass, offering a view of the glowing capitol dome. The view was spectacular, but if the direction of his desk was any indication, Caracalla didn’t spend much time enjoying it. The only other item of note in the room was a wooden door. Presumably it went somewhere boring, like a closet, but Matt’s interest was piqued nonetheless.

“Oliver, you check out whatever’s behind that door,” Matt ordered.

“Getting bossy, aren’t we?” Oliver asked, but he began walking in the direction Matt had indicated.

“What are my orders, captain?” Anna asked, the corners of her lips tugging up as she offered him a brief salute.

“Can you look in the filing cabinets, please?”

“You got it.”

That left the desk for Matt. He made his way over to it and slid into the leather chair, surveying the room as he did so. Caracalla looked at this view every day, and Matt tried to see the office as he would. Based on the cleanliness of the man’s desk, it appeared that he liked order, so his effects would be as organized as possible. The filing cabinets would be used for filing things, and the desk would store…desk stuff.

Matt slumped in frustration. He knew nothing about running a business and next to nothing about Caracalla, making it nearly impossible to guess how a stranger would organize his office. Even if he could determine the organizational system, where exactly would secrets about “something less than honorable” fit? Under S, for something, or H, for honorable?

Rolling his eyes at his own thoughts, he sucked in a breath and was hit again by the sterile scent of cleaning products. This time, though, he also detected a whiff of—rotten eggs? Where had he smelled that recently? And then it hit him. When Luke had taken them to hell, Matt had smelled the same scent under the smoke. It reminded him of the old bubblers they’d had in grade school, which had filtered the water so poorly it always smelled of sulfur. He nearly laughed as he realized the connection. The scent of sulfur was always associated with the devil and hell. Apparently not all the lore about Luke was false, whatever he wanted them to think.

Matt forced his attention back to the task at hand. If the rotten egg he could smell really did mean hell, Caracalla must have some sort of connection to it right in his office. He'd been in hell himself only a few hours ago, so it wasn't nearly as hard to believe as it should have been. He closed his eyes, picturing the meeting room. Where had the sulfur smell come from? It had been very faint, so it must be off in the distance, but he couldn’t remember a single thing that would smell like that. Maybe it came in from a different part of hell--or maybe, Caracalla just had rotten eggs in his desk and it had nothing to do with hell. He squinched his eyes tighter, trying to reason through the options. It was reasonable to assume that Caracalla was doing something with hell, since Luke had gotten involved. The devil presumably wouldn't care about him if he were just scamming his company, since that happened all the time. Besides, Luke had given them very specific directions to his office, so they should find something here.

Pleased with his logic, he returned to the idea that the rotten eggs indicated hell. What type of connection could someone have to hell? Luke had said it was another realm, but there was clearly a way to transport people between the two. There must therefore be a path between the two, or some way of creating a path. He opened his eyes and looked at the amulet visible against the blue of his windbreaker. How could a chunk of rock and metal connect two different places? He needed to ask Luke about that too—or better yet, Elias, since he'd probably get more straightforward answers from the man.

Tucking away the question of how for the moment, he turned to why. What could one do with direct access to hell? The excerpts of The Inferno he’d read in his literature class told him hell had multiple layers and was a place for torturing people who had done evil things while alive. Matt suddenly felt sick. When reading the book, he’d assumed it was fiction, but in light of all that had happened—was it real? The punishments in the story now seemed unbearably cruel. The people were tortured, day in and day out, without any hope of salvation. Matt could scarcely imagine the anguish he would feel. The worst part, he thought, would be that no matter how immune to the pain you became, you would always feel some glint of hope that the next day would bring relief. The human mind wasn’t designed to grasp eternity.

He shuddered and resolved to be a better person from then on. He wouldn’t snap at Carrie or betray someone, or—he needed to brush up on the sins Dante described so he could be sure to avoid them.

“Come in here!” Oliver’s shout snapped Matt out of his reverie, and he hustled to the door Oliver had passed through. Inside, he found Oliver crouched on the red tiles of a small bathroom. The four drawers of the washstand looked as though they’d been ransacked, and Matt winced, thinking of the tidiness of the rest of the office. This was no doubt Oliver’s work, and they’d be hard pressed to replicate the organization that had existed until a few minutes earlier.

Matt looked to the floor where Oliver was crouching and forgot his annoyance. Next to his feet, symbols were scratched on the tiles with chalk. There were smear marks next to them, as though more had been erased. He could make out an “i” and an “h” near something that looked like a trident. Next to that, there were two lines drawn in parallel. The drawing cut off abruptly where the eraser marks started. On top of the writing, half of a bowl lay toppled on its side. When he crouched to get a closer look, he could see the cut side was completely smooth, much smoother than anything cut with a saw would be. It looked more like someone had sliced the bowl with a laser. He could feel his arms prickle as the hairs stood on end.

“What is that?” Anna breathed from behind him. He jumped, startled to find her so close. He hadn’t heard her enter the room. He turned to answer and froze, straining his ears. He thought he had heard a noise from outside the office. He waited a minute, then relaxed as no other sounds reached him.

“We just—” Matt stopped as the unmistakable sound o f a door closing echoed through the empty floor. Anna and Oliver heard it this time as well. Oliver’s head snapped up from his examination of the floor, and Anna’s face whitened.

“There’s someone coming!” Anna sounded panicked. “We need to go. How do we get out of here? Can we go out the window?” She ran to the picture glass and started pulling on the bottom sill. Matt was close enough to see the window couldn’t possibly be opened. Not to mention they were on the ninth floor.

He turned to look at Oliver, but he was frozen in place. Matt couldn’t expect any help from him either. He packed the part of him that was panicking into a tight box in the corner of his mind. Emotions wouldn't help right now, just logic. Logic could get him through anything. He surveyed the room coolly.